4. Institutional Worlds

On Decorum

On April 20, 2023, Representative Zooey Zephyr, a white transgender woman, was silenced on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives after speaking out against a bill that proposed denying gender-affirming care to transgender youth. Zephyr admonished her colleagues: “The only thing I will say is if you vote ‘yes’ on this bill and ‘yes’ on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands” (quoted in Trotta 2023).

The Freedom Caucus quickly moved to censure Zephyr, issuing a statement that misgendered her and claimed her speech violated rules of decorum (Hanson et al. 2023). Even before the censure was passed, she was denied speaking rights on the floor and was disallowed, as the only trans person in the legislature, from commenting on antitrans bills. While Zephyr was admonished for pointing to demonstrable facts about the impacts of the proposed legislation, conservative lawmakers would remain free to peddle their transphobia across the United States without censure. In Florida, a legislator referred to transgender people as “demons,” “mutants,” and “imps” (Migdon 2023). So much for decorum.

Standing outside of the chamber, Zephyr told reporters: “We will not be complicit in our own eradication” (Girten 2023).

I could feel her rage; it was also my rage. Her words echoed in my head. I had recently come to a similar conclusion about the politics of my own professional space: the US academy, the discipline of geography. “It is like they expect you to politely participate in your own dehumanization. I refuse to participate in my own dehumanization.” The words shot out of my mouth: sharp, hot. I hadn’t said it like that before. I wasn’t talking about politicians, I was talking about my colleagues, about an institution.

Institutional Worlds

What is an institution? What do we refer to when we invoke “the institution”? What does it mean for something—a meaning, a practice, a way of seeing—to become institutionalized? To become “the way things are” and are “meant to be”?

For the phenomenologist, an institution is something of a world. Worlds are the product of the institutionalization of certain meanings (and not others), meanings that become determinants of social practice. As Carlos Belvedere and Alexis Gros (2019) point out, institutions operate in two interrelated senses in phenomenology. For someone like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, institutions are the sedimentation of particular forms of sense and meaning: how meaning is shared, how modes of perception become stabilized and reproduced. For the more sociologically minded, institution refers to social organizations like schools, religions, families, and the like. These senses of the term institution are entangled with one another: Social organizations take form around shared frames of meaning and sense-making, and inversely, dominant modes of perception are produced through concrete social and cultural formations.

In either case, an institution is an intersubjective formation, a collective human activity, a “cultural pattern of group life” (Schutz 1964, 92). All institutions have origins and histories, though they tend to be treated as timeless, natural formations, becoming part of what phenomenologists call “the natural attitude”: the ordinary contours of existence that remain unproblematized and taken for granted. In other words, institutions become the background, the space in which we move and act with a tacit knowledge of their boundaries, rules, and norms. Institutions, then, become something of an objective structure by taking on the quality of a world: by becoming the structuring conditions of meaning-making, action, and possibility, both in a symbolic and material sense. We live in institutions, we live out institutions, through what Pierre Bourdieu (1984) calls “habitus,” a pretheoretical knowledge that takes these worlds for granted as “the” world (Belvedere and Gros 2019, 53), like a fish in water (Puwar 2004, 126).

Like any world, institutional worlds are a frame through which we access what is possible; by organizing social reality according to particular knowledge, practices, and relations, they represent a narrowing of possibility or closing of the world (Belvedere and Gros 2019). They configure our collective sense of meaning and possibility, working to define our horizons. This defining of horizons is not politically neutral: Institutions and their invocation can operate as a form of coercive power meant to keep people in place and police possibility (56). This is because institutions themselves are composed of a system of relations and social positions, which pattern interactions according to implicit social rules, including hierarchies of value and power. Deviation from these rules is perceived as akin to a deviation from nature or noncompliance to a duty and, accordingly, is met with social sanctions (56). Institutional worlds reinforce and reproduce themselves through this management of hierarchy and possibility.

A Critical Phenomenology of Institutions

Those of us who accidentally or purposefully break these rules become an institution’s deviant, defiant subjects, its queer subjects. Within institutions, we become space invaders (Puwar 2004) and, from this positionality, we develop tactical theories of institutional space and how it works. In becoming institutional misfits, we develop a critical knowledge of institutions and their logics. By virtue of these circumstances, we might become critical phenomenologists of institutions.

A critical phenomenology of institutions begins from the politics of institutional space—from power, difference, and exclusion as structuring conditions of these worlds. By focusing on this nexus, we gain insight into how—despite being shared and intersubjective sociospatial formations—institutions are experienced differently for different people depending on their location within prevailing hierarchies of power and difference. Indeed, some of us encounter barriers—walls, closed doors, checkpoints, questions—that do not even exist, that are imperceptible, for others. This speaks to how institutions are structured around difference: These barriers move strategically in relation to minoritized and resistant bodies (Lajoie 2022, 322). Accordingly, there are particular epistemological conditions under which these barriers can be perceived: Sara Ahmed (2012, 174) clarifies, “Only the practical labor of ‘coming up against’ the institution allows this wall to become apparent. To those who do not come up against it, the wall does not appear—the institution is lived and experienced as being open, committed, and diverse.”

As discussed previously, being in a minoritized body means inhabiting a different perceptual reality that is unavailable to, or hidden for, others. Forms of privilege—which are partial, dynamic, and situational—define these epistemological conditions. Yet disability theorist Tanya Titchkosky (2011, 85) reminds us to look beyond the individual subject to understand that the failure to perceive these barriers is not simply the failure of a perceiving subject; it is a structural condition that is built into a situation, into a world: “Something has organized the possibility of not perceiving” (see also Price 2024, 63). What produces, naturalizes, and invisibilizes exclusion is a confluence of somethings: ableism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, cisheteronormativity, and their entanglements—logics and histories that come together to produce the cultural fabric of the United States and its institutions.

We might also understand the “something” that conditions the perceptual field—and with it, our social spaces and our lived possibilities—as a form of violence. For Margaret Price (2024, 71), we cannot think about the relations between bodies and space without thinking about the constitutive role of harm: “Who is harmed, when, and how . . . is part of what space is and what it does. Different spaces are not perceived ‘differently’ in a neutral sense. They are safer for some and more harmful for others—almost always.” For Price, failing to account for the role of harm in producing space reinforces white-centric and ableist understandings of space; it tends toward reproducing an abstract conception of space, one detached from history, bodies, and the social logics that organize them. And, as Henri Lefebvre (1991, 387) points out, this abstract conception of space is inherently violent; it is a vehicle for violence.

A critical phenomenology of institutional space (and space more generally) begins from this differential distribution of harm and exclusion (see Butler 2004) and the epistemological vantage point it provides. Beginning from the experience of those deemed outside of, against, or strangers within institutions, a critical phenomenological critique analyzes how institutions (re)produce dominant worlds, worlds configured around the hierarchical valuation and management of social and embodied difference.

Academic Worlds, Academic Subjects

To consider these dynamics, let us travel to one institutional world: the US academy. It is an institution I’ve come to know quite well. This knowledge has mostly come in the form of lessons, the kind of lessons doled out to a noncompliant child: coercive lessons meant to instill in you the order of the world and your place within it.

Academia is, after all, its own little world. It is an institutional lifeworld composed of “objects, persons, discourses, documents . . . technologies, ideals, and values” and attendant social codes (Lajoie 2022, 324). Victoria Reyes (2022, 14) describes it as such: “The academic workplace is a world unto itself, with its own insiders and outsiders. Its own rules.” What kind of world is it? While academia is often positioned as a space of free intellectual exchange, Lorgia García Peña (2022, 46) counters: “Rather than being the place where this is possible, academia is simply a microcosm of everything that is wrong with the world.” Indeed, academia tends to reproduce many of the same oppressive logics as the societies it emerges from; as Asian American scholars Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde and Wei Ming Dariotis (2019, 45) describe, “The oppression we study in society is the oppression we experience in academia; it is the same oppression.” This is because the US academy, rather than being insulated from the oppressive logics shaping US society more generally—white supremacy, settler colonialism, xenophobia, classism, transphobia, ableism, structural racism, sexism—is governed by these same logics.

Many universities in the United States are built on stolen Indigenous land and the financialization of stolen Indigenous land (la paperson 2017). Others were built by enslaved people, financed by the slave trade, and have various other points of contact with the plantation economies and geographies (Baldwin 2022). At the time of their founding and for some time thereafter, universities were for elite white men. Today, though the university community is defined much more broadly, this assumption—this origin—remains embedded and embodied within these institutions.

The assumed subject of academic spaces is literally built into them; a social order is built into them. Oftentimes, buildings are named after so-called great white men (including confederates and slave owners) and portraits of great white men line the hallways. In several buildings at my former university, men’s and women’s bathrooms alternated by floor because those who planned and designed the building never imagined that women would be in the building (let alone genderqueer and trans people), requiring that they retrofit men’s rooms every other floor when women did begin to appear. In many cases, planners and designers never imagined that disabled people would enter the doors of these buildings, and it is still something the vast majority of nondisabled people fail to imagine and anticipate.

These social and spatial norms embedded in institution spaces shape who we are and who we can be here. They produce forms of exclusion, and for those who do gain access, they exert the pressures of inclusion, with institutional logics attempting to contort minoritized people into becoming proper subjects. In other words, institutional worlds beget institutional subjects.

Given these histories and their living legacies, many of us do not quite fit here. We fail to become proper subjects of the institution. We do not take on the correct comportment, the correct discourse, the correct orientation. We haven’t lived the right kind of lives (Reyes 2022). Often our bodies get in the way of “belonging,” and so do our commitments. Trans philosopher Perry Zurn (2025, 38) describes how “women, people of color, queer and trans people, people with disabilities, first-generation scholars, and their confluence, among others—are constructed by the university as a problem for the university” from the start, due to these histories. A deviation is registered by our very appearance—which remains uncanny, unexpected, out of place—despite the ever-proliferating discourse on diversity, equity, and inclusion within these institutions (Ahmed 2012).

Sometimes this misfit is incidental, other times willful. Either way, we become the bad subjects of institutions: institutional monsters. In the white spaces of the UK Parliament, Nirmal Puwar (2004, 52) describes how Black subjects become seen as “an organisational terror” and “space invaders” for the ways they explode the white myth of sameness and rupture the conventions of “civil discourse” in a historically white space (131). Ahmed’s (2017, 2023) figure of the feminist killjoy rather precisely traces how those who are not willing to go along with racism, sexism, and the reproduction of other systems of oppression are produced as disruptors and betrayers of institutions. These troubled positionalities render us queer in relation to the institution, and here, as queer feminist crip philosopher Kim Q. Hall (2022, 32) writes, to be queer “is to be disoriented in ways that make strange the taken-for-granted horizon of an institution.”

As the institution’s queer subjects, we will not be granted what Reyes (2022) calls “full academic citizenship.” Rather, as outsiders, we “are constantly reminded that our presence in the academy is contingent and in constant flux” (10–11). Our citizenship, personhood, and belonging here is conditional. Upon what conditions does it rest? It rests upon our compliance with established norms, on our agreement not to shatter the cishetero white myth of sameness (Puwar 2004). It relies on participating in the protection and reproduction of the institution. Our “belonging” relies on not being too different, on not becoming a problem.

Becoming a Trans Problem

What happens when you are perceived as a problem by virtue of your existence? By virtue of the unwavering reality of your body and its history? Or less innocently, what happens when you become a problem as a means of resisting the inertia of the university, its histories, and its everyday and more spectacular forms of violence?

I ask this question as someone who has become a problem for institutions—specifically, but not only, a trans problem—sometimes inadvertently and at other times tactically. It is hard not to cause problems, after all, when the fact of your existence seems to set off awkward interpersonal, collective, and institutional negotiations about the fundamentals of language, of bodies, of social relations, of space.

How are trans people constituted as a problem in US universities? Through a historical, philosophical, and poetic examination of “trans inclusion” at the Five Colleges in Massachusetts, Zurn describes the ways in which trans people—or, rather, trans inclusion—are constituted as a problem. Trans inclusion is treated mostly as a legal problem (i.e., nondiscrimination policies), a linguistic problem (i.e., pronouns), a facilities problem (i.e., gender-inclusive bathrooms and dorms), a health-care problem (i.e., gender-affirming care), and an awareness problem (i.e., education and trainings). In various ways then, trans people—our identities and embodiments—pose problems for this institutional world. And we often pose problems in new ways, pushing against the rubrics of a ready-made model of trans inclusion. Sometimes we become problems when trans inclusion fails, when we run up against the cisheteronormativity of the institution, when we get stuck. We lean into the disruptive potential of being a problem—as well as its creative, world-building potential—fashioning “trans tactics” to make and unmake space (Zurn 2025, 126).

Trans, then, operates as one subject position and institutional relation (among many) that has the potential to disrupt the discourse of inclusion at work in academic institutions and to render visible its normative underpinnings. In this capacity, trans embodiment and its institutional negotiations provide one starting point for a critical and queer phenomenology of institutional space.

Complaint as Queer Phenomenology

In what follows, I sketch the affective and lived contours of a critical and queer phenomenology of institutional space, from my own experience navigating academia as a white, queer, and trans person. Weaving together scenes from my own institutional life and insights from critical university studies and geographies of difference, I trace how embodied norms, professional discourses, systems of colonial knowledge, and affective economies work to reproduce and maintain hierarchies of difference and systems of oppression in university spaces.

These are stories about institutions as much as they are complaints about institutions. Following Ahmed (2021, 38), I fashion complaint as a queer phenomenology of the institution. Complaints that rupture the unspoken norms of institutional space can make explicit what is relegated to the “background” of institutions and their cultures (41). Whether or not one’s complaint issues from a queer subject position per se, complaint tends to queer one’s relation to the institution. Complaint positions one against the institution, as a problem for an institution, a subject position from which we can see and experience all of the mechanisms that institutions use to keep people in place, to deflect accountability, and to resist change.

These stories are somewhat personal, but that does not make them any less institutional. As Ahmed (2021, 38) points out, “A complaint is a record of what happens to a person, as well as of what happens in institutions. Complaints are personal as well as institutional.” If “the personal is institutional,” we can glimpse how institutions fashion subjectivities (38). The personal is institutional because—as Andrea N. Baldwin (2022) develops in her decolonial Black feminist reading of the university—the production of minoritized subjectivities in the university operates through affective economies that cause minoritized subjects to feel the university in very particular ways. By following these bad affects and the complaints that emerge from them, we can trace a circuit between the production of knowledge, subjectivity, and institutional space, a circuit animated by the meaning and mattering of difference within systems of white supremacist, capitalist cisheteropatriarchy. I offer these stories and summon these affective resonances from scenes of my own experience to trace the intimate connections between the constitution of selves and the oppressive logics shaping space, again tracing the coproduction of dominant sociospatial orders and minoritized subjectivities in one particular institution: the US academy and the discipline of geography.

Scene: Your Body Is Screaming

2016. I sat down in the professor’s office, his seat of power tucked into a corner hallway behind a closed door. I took my place in a chair emblazoned with the logo of the university, the kind you ordered from an alumni catalog. It was the start of my second semester in graduate school, and he had summoned me here to talk about some unspecified issue he had with my performance in his course. He posed his opening question: “In Latin there is a phrase Fidei Defensor. Do you know what that phrase means?” I shrugged. “It means defender of faith.” Offering no explanation of what this meant, he went on to berate me about my apparent zealotry that was somehow confirmed by the questions I would ask in class. “You are a defender of the faith,” he claimed, in an exasperated tone.

“This seminar has been going well for thirty years,” he told me. “But this year there is a problem.” He paused and looked at me. Feigning naivete about his meaning, I asked, “What do you think the problem is?” He described that students in the class were not engaged. I agreed, we certainly weren’t—many scrolled on their computers, pinging messages back and forth to each other. I had been caught skimming a book during the class. I admit it was a bit rude, but everyone else was doing the same thing, albeit under the guise of taking notes on their laptop.

As it turns out, reading the book was not actually what was at issue. The problem was not any particular behavior of mine but my general being—a problem I would grow used to hearing about in graduate school. “Your body is screaming . . . screaming at your peers. SCREAMING! They are too scared to participate in the class.” I pushed him to articulate what he meant, and he explained my body was screaming by virtue of how I was sitting in my chair (I admit, I was slouched and “manspreading,” though in just the same way as I’d seen male faculty sit in faculty meetings). Shifting to a more conciliatory tone, he asked that I just sit up straight and “look more interested” so that the class could carry on without incident. How was it that my body could produce such a problem? Why was it that none of the other bored bodies in the room elicited this response?

Unsure what to do with this strange grievance, as I had not yet found the word queer to analyze it, I asked another professor—a feminist—about this. She suggested I sit up straight in my chair and act a bit more ladylike because that professor “likes his women perky.”

This was the beginning of something. The beginning of graduate school, but also the start of a budding awareness of my queerness and of the cisheteronormative institution I had just entered. Geography was new to me; I was only beginning to get oriented to this tradition. Apparently, having my body in the room was enough to disrupt whatever this tradition was (Ahmed 2023, 9).

Scene: Queer Panic

2017. I was pulled into another office, this time the office of the department leadership. I was organizing an art show to accompany my department’s critical geography conference—a conference highlighting geographic approaches that reckon with power, difference, and oppression (see Kinkaid 2019). I had been put in touch with some folks at the art school who wanted to do a drag performance as part of the art show, making use of the departmental spaces to make a metacommentary on the cisheteronormativity of institutional spaces.

Now we were in a meeting with departmental leadership—me and the professor organizing the conference—because the leadership had some questions about my plans. “What kind of art will this be?” they asked. “Will it be . . . family friendly?” At this point I figured I should mention the drag performers—those bastions of family unfriendliness—at which point the conference organizer launched into a concerned commentary about how we needed to be careful about “blowback” because he had seen “this kind of thing” happen at other schools and, reportedly, faculty and provosts had to resign over it. What “this kind of thing” referred to, I wasn’t sure.

The apparently troubling proposal was that drag performers would be stationed in and around the elevators and guide conference participants from the ground floor—where the conference presentations were—to the third floor, where the refreshments and art were. The trouble was that the elevators transgressed the boundaries of space—passing through floors associated with other departments, departments that allegedly housed figures like a “conservative meteorologist.” I was told that we could not subject innocent passersby—figured as science students who just want to come in on a Saturday to do their homework—to this queer content because they had not “signed up” to encounter a person in drag.

Ultimately it was decided that we would allow the drag performance—with further consultation, discussion, and assurances about the “content” of the performance. But they would not be allowed in the elevators. It was suggested that they could use miscellaneous spaces on the third floor—including a literal closet—for their performance. Additionally, it was suggested that the time and location of the performance be clearly marked on a map so that people could be informed (and avoid it if needed). Here, maps and boundaries play a deeply ironic role in planning a critical geography conference, marking who belongs and who is perceived as a threat to order and propriety (Kinkaid 2019).

How was I supposed to feel about these negotiations as the queer curator of the show? I thought of my mundane transits in the elevator, sometimes accompanied by my girlfriend at the time, who was also in the department. Was it a burden to encounter us there, on our way in to work together? Had anyone “signed up” to encounter us there? Was I, was my lifestyle, “family friendly”? I couldn’t help but question my own belonging there and what kinds of panicked, closed-door negotiations might attend it.

Amid these negotiations, I was told by the organizer that “when you join an institution, you’ll understand.” I was already beginning to understand what this “institution” was, what it meant for me. This was an early lesson in how institutions are interested in regulating space, in regulating bodies. Some bodies were managed like crises (Baldwin 2022, 100). I was learning that my body was one such body, a body in/of crisis. I did not understand it at the time, but I was also fighting for my right to be in these spaces. For it would only be a matter of time before this cishetero discomfort would be wielded against me too, before it would come to regulate and constrain my embodied horizons.

Regulating Voice, or Straight, White, and Polite

It did not take long in graduate school to realize that my perspective, that my voice, was a threat to this institution. I had a pesky habit of asking questions. The things I had questions about—whiteness, cisheteronormativity, patriarchy—were apparently subjects that we, despite being self-assured critical intellectuals, were not to speak about, at least not when they applied to us. And, oddly enough, it wasn’t only my voice that was at issue; it was also my body that caused a disturbance, which apparently was itself a problematic speech act (YOUR BODY IS SCREAMING!).

Those who were threatened by my voice might—to deflect the substance of my critiques—say I lacked “decorum.” That was fine with me. One could only hope to fail in these terms: decorum, professionalism, civility. I carefully listened for these words or their suggestion, where they appeared, how they were used, what came in their wake. They were words that stopped conversations, stopped particular voices, particular people, from getting through. They were words of the institution (Kinkaid 2024).

I turned these words back on themselves, pointing to their backgrounds, to their location in a particular culture: a cishet white culture. I didn’t know it then, but I had already embarked on a “phenomenology of institutional language” (Lajoie 2022, 320). I questioned the very terms through which I was read and responded to, the subtle terms ordering space and social relations, the myths that were supposed to hold us all together.

Apparently “there is so much you are not supposed to say if the project is to keep things together, to hold us together” (Ahmed 2023, 92). I quickly learned that speaking to the operations of oppression in such spaces as the university—ones portrayed as evolved, enlightened, progressive, rational, free, open, merit-based—is a dangerous speech act. Calling out the normativities embedded within the idea of professionalism is a risky move, insofar as it points to embodied identities that tend to be regarded as irrelevant—if not inappropriate—to discuss in this professional sphere. This is a setting in which the body is thought not to matter, either because it is neutral, universal, and good (i.e., white, cishetero) and fades into the background of a profession that values the mind or because, in the case of nonwhite and other queered bodies, we are committed to seeing past our differences and embracing diversity.

In either case, bodies don’t matter; we treat everyone the same. As Puwar (2004, 12) points out, this “ontological denial of embodiment is implicit in institutional narratives of professionalism.” Attempting to name this problem, to make the point that bodies do matter, that they appear to determine how one is treated here and what is within reach, means “going against the grain of the accepted institutional narrative which: (a) denies the body; and (b) relies on a myth of sameness” (131–32). One will likely fail to gain traction in such a discursive space, and when a point does stick, it is read as a “renegade act” (138). Puwar describes, “One is seen to be breaking rank . . . for space invaders, who never fully belong in the first place, the perils of naming what is ontologically denied in the very being of institutional narratives is even higher” (138).

Speaking about things like racism, sexism, ableism, and transphobia in academic spaces is thus often responded to with rather curious reactions that locate the problem not in the professional space, its culture, or the social relations that compose it (for it cannot possibly exist there: bodies don’t matter, we value diversity) but in the speech acts of anyone who dares to point it out. Ahmed (2021, 3) maps this discursive circuit when she describes, “To become a complainer is to become the location of the problem.” To complain is to affirm one’s status as a space invader (Puwar 2004).

Such speech upsets the unspoken terms of membership in this professional space: We are the same; we value difference, but we are the same. Not upsetting this bizarre masquerade of cishetero white identity production becomes a condition of professionalism, a condition of being allowed to “belong” and to advance in a career. As Puwar (2004, 138–39) describes, in the case of racism in academia: “Those who come out and speak of racism among their colleagues . . . have to be prepared to interrogate and perhaps even break links with those one has formed working, dependent, and ‘chummy’ relations with. Thus within institutions, the aversion to seeing racism is coupled with the aversion to confronting colleagues and especially superiors. There is an overriding preference for consensus, which manifests itself as etiquette.” This sense of etiquette—the norms of professionalism—are required to hold this delicate arrangement together. This etiquette entails not addressing certain problems in the workplace, not addressing problematic cultures, not addressing whiteness, and certainly not addressing senior colleagues and their dysfunctional and, at times, abusive behavior.

There are clear disincentives to speaking up and incentives for staying quiet embedded in this arrangement that do their work. These logics create us as academic subjects as they create academic space. They produce minoritized people who internalize these logics for our survival, learning to take up less space, to move and speak very strategically, to carefully mind the landmines of cishetero white fragility, to overlook the violence, to not bring it up, to bury the harm, to bury ourselves. White people learn that it is our role and our professional duty to protect and reproduce this culture, if only by our silence. Afterall, “in return for your silence, you are promised what are widely considered to be the most highly valued resources for academics. . . . When you are rewarded for silence, you are rewarded for compliance. . . . A system is reproduced by rewarding those who are willing to reproduce the system” (Ahmed 2023, 100).

Noncompliance with these norms, however, means you aren’t professional, you aren’t ethical, you don’t belong here, you are not one of us. It means being portrayed, with unnerving consistency, as disruptive, as destructive, as breaking with the conventional order to the extent of being dangerous, maybe even criminal. It means being reduced, over and over again, to an outsider, a threat, a “feminist killjoy” (Ahmed 2023), a trope.

A Poisonous Influence

2023. What does it feel like to be a trope? As a genderqueer and trans person born in a female body, it felt like, in these spaces, I was consistently being reduced to a patriarchal caricature of myself. I developed queer self-knowledge in this space in part by “grappling with [these] cartoon-like dominant forms of visibility” (Hall 2022, 58). As discussed in chapter 3, “Constrained Horizons,” the oppressive perceptions of others can operate as doors, closing down our lived possibilities (Ahmed 2023, 163). Think of the little girl from Iris Marion Young’s (2005) work who is learning her place in the world: In becoming a woman, her body shrinks, space contracts, the world recedes. Or think of Frantz Fanon (1967), who writes about what it is like to be caught in another’s dominating gaze, being reduced—through the compression of an entire history of colonial racialized violence—to a devalued stereotype, to a trope.

It did not take long in the academy before I began to learn who I was expected to be and who I was taken to be here. I learned about the expectations placed on my body when I was disciplined for deviating from them. These dynamics were a consistent feature of my time as a graduate student; their logics became gradually more apparent, forming patterns, picking up inertia. I was learning about who I was here—not who I was for myself, but who I was for others through an oppressive gaze (Ngo 2017). Much of this I learned indirectly, through inferences: If they are uncomfortable with a queer person in the building, maybe I make them uncomfortable too. If he doesn’t like how I am sitting in class, maybe there is a way I am expected to sit.

Sometimes, though, these matters were communicated to me directly. My more brash colleagues told me quite bluntly who I was and how I ought to be if I wanted to remain a member of this community. The veneer of professionalism was thin: All you had to do was question their intellectual or moral authority and it wasn’t long before the name-calling and personal attacks would begin.

One senior professor, a straight, white man in a direct position of authority over me, took it upon himself to impress upon me this lesson. Behind closed doors and over text messages and emails, he called me “domineering.” “Self-righteous.” “Polarizing.” “A very manipulative bully” with a “militant agenda.” He told me I talked to people too much; I was a gossip. He told me I took up too much space. He told me that the ethical problems I detected in my professional community were “inventions” that I had generated because I “seek public attention.” These are words that say, “You are the wrong kind of woman,” a hysterical, vindictive woman.

But I wasn’t a woman. I was something more devious, more deceptive. When he was losing his argument against me, he called me “intellectually dishonest.” He told me I was “bad news” and that “many professors agree.” “You are a poisonous influence,” he told me. A poisonous influence! My speech, my presence, was likened to poison in a well.

This was my pedagogy in patriarchy: a lesson delivered over and over again, always through the force of male anger and authority. A lesson delivered through tropes—“controlling images” (Hill Collins 2020)—that were meant to tell me who I was and what my place was. He did not know the weight these words carried, the histories, the violence. It was this weight that allowed him to wield them against me, it is what made them stick. It was that weight, the weight of history—a history that produced a direct threat to my life—that made panic well up in my chest, that made my heart race.

He apparently did not know, or feel accountable to the fact, that tropes of contagion, contamination, toxicity, and poison have long been used to demonize queer people. According to these eugenic logics, queer, disabled, and nonwhite bodies “were held to be, literally, biological enemies of the human species, pollutants and pathogens whose very presence posed a physical and possible mortal threat” (McWhorter 2010, 76).

He apparently did not know, or feel accountable to the fact, that this kind of metaphor was being circulated in political discourses that were stripping trans people of basic rights and dignities. For example, there was the completely fabricated, pseudoscientific condition called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” which posited that being trans was literally a social contagion—leading to a slew of legislation targeting queer and trans spaces, books, and people.

He did not even know it, but he “had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories” (Fanon 1967, 111). What he took to be his unbiased perception of reality was a tightly knit fabric of sexist, transphobic tropes. It was so enveloping he couldn’t detect it; he mistook his sexism and transphobia for the bare facts of reality. A self-described fairly conservative man, annoyed at the mandates of being “politically correct,” he told me he was entitled to say these things because, sexist and transphobic resonances aside, they were true.

This had become the fabric of my social life in this department, in this institution, in this tradition, in this world: a dense layering of perceptions, tropes, narratives, and figurations that hemmed me in from all sides, that overdetermined me. Mine had become an “outwardly determined subjectivity” (McCann 2018, 158). While many of these messages operated subtly, indirectly, or implicitly, in moments like these they were given clarifying voice, becoming condensed, crystallized, and weaponized by the occasional aggrieved white man who had the nerve and the ignorance to tell it to my face, to make it all plain. It was like he was shouting, “This is how the system works! Stay in your place!”

This is how I learned what this institution was, underneath the stated principles and well-rehearsed diversity statements. The cognitive dissonance between what this community took itself to be—liberal, open, fair, democratic, inclusive—and what it was under the surface was dizzying. I glimpsed the kind of vertigo my racially minoritized colleagues lived through here, a sense of disorientation I was otherwise protected from by my whiteness. On the light side of the supposedly collegial, liberally minded, straight, white department, I was a generally well-liked colleague and, as a trans person, living proof of our department’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. On its dark side—behind closed doors, in private negotiations, in coercive if not abusive interactions few people saw—I was a conditional academic citizen whose belonging, status, and rights depended on my silence, my going along with it, my not posing or, rather, pointing to problems. This is the politics of a cisheteronormative, white institution; this is the politics of diversity, equity, and inclusion: Everyone is welcome, so long as they know their place.

The trouble, of course, is that the place of trans people is no place (Gieseking 2023, 573).

Forbidden Speech

A poisonous influence. This is how I learned about the politics of voice. You were not meant to talk back, and here, following bell hooks (1989, 5), talking back simply meant “speaking as an equal to an authority figure.” I refused to learn this lesson, again and again. That refusal would cost me: Various punishments were doled out, and, like hooks, these “punishments I received for ‘talking back’ were intended to suppress all possibility that I would create my own speech” (6). But I knew that my silence, my compliance, would cost me more.

That clarity did not soften the blows of the punishments though. My voice—my speaking back to authority figures, however well-reasoned—would be managed through limitations placed on my “intellectual speech,” ad hoc targeted moderation systems, prohibitions from circulating my work in certain US states, deplatforming, bullying, professional retaliation, rumors of complaints against me, and the specter of legal action that would settle like a dense fog over my institutional and intellectual life.

Even while I maintained a resistant attitude to these institutional strategies of containing my voice, these seemingly unending negotiations about my right to speak were corrosive of my self-image and sense of belonging. They got in the way of my life: my personhood, my sense of reality, my sense of meaning. The weight of the fear and injustice accumulated and left me wondering: Am I who they say I am? Am I unethical? Am I a destroyer? Am I a monster?

Surrounded by a political climate in which trans people are literally being positioned as a threat to society and all of its values, these questions took on a destructive weight. What was dispiriting was the clear resonance I could hear between my life in a supposedly progressive intellectual institution and a cacophony of trans-antagonistic logics “outside,” ugly biases we had supposedly disavowed but never looked at very closely. The discourse they used against me, the way they perceived and portrayed me, was subtly (and, at other times, less subtly) transphobic (and sexist): It drew on and resonated with long-established histories and discourses that portrayed trans life as a threat to order, to nature, to safety, to sense.

In this way, being trans in the spaces of the university felt like a microcosm of a broader political and existential reality that constrained my life, that threatened the fundamental possibility of my life. Again and again, here and elsewhere, I was running up against a complex, nested, layered set of institutions that denied recognition to trans life at every scale imaginable, from our bodies, to everyday institutions, to public spaces, to the law of this land.

The violence was never far away. It oscillated, resurfacing through new and familiar forms, jumping scales, drawing a throughline starting from my body, running through the hallways of my department, through an array of professional spaces, to the legislatures, the bathrooms, the streets, following me, a dense cloud of static hovering around my body, a suffocating pressure, encircling my everyday life and sense of possibility.

It was the same scene again and again, and the stakes were getting higher. Was what I had to say so dangerous? Dangerous to whom? What would be the consequences of talking back, of making powerful people uncomfortable?

On Comfort

What I learned through these experiences is that the guiding commitment of these spaces is not social justice, dialogue, democratic decision-making, diversity, inclusion, or any other such lofty principle. The guiding commitment enacted in these spaces is a commitment to white worldmaking (Kauffman 2023, 181), a project that is enacted through the politics of comfort. Straight, white institutional politics are a politics of comfort; straight, white institutional spaces are spaces of comfort for cishetero white people. As Ahmed (2006, 129) argues, whiteness can be understood as a habit, as a means of achieving comfort, of keeping discomfort at arm’s length. Cisheteronormativity functions similarly as a form of public comfort that protects from the threat of difference (Ahmed 2017, 123).

This “individual and collective pursuit of comfort makes social worlds” (Eaves et al. 2023, 520). Following LaToya Eaves and colleagues, we might ask: “What kinds of spaces, boundaries, and power relations are generated by comfort, and for whom?” (517). Some bodies are entitled to their comfort, while others are seen as a perpetual source of discomfort for others. Not surprisingly, “discomfort becomes distributed around long-established hierarchies of geography, race, class, and gender” (Silva 2023, 563). Some of us are always already figured as “space invaders” (Puwar 2004) due to the meanings our bodies and identities carry in the context of colonial, white supremacist, and cisheteronormative institutions. These bodies are “seen/read/disciplined as a disruption to, or an impingement on, the geography and politics of a normative whiteness”—and, I would add, cisheteronormativity—“even in progressive spaces” (Silva 2023, 570). Minoritized subjects hover on the boundary of dis/comfort, always already poised to commit transgression, to make a disruption. We are conditional academic citizens (Reyes 2022) whose “conditional welcoming is based on keeping the status quo undisturbed and ‘comfortable’” (Baldwin 2022, 100).

When discomfort becomes attached to our bodies, to who we are in the world, every perception of us is figured through this discomfort; we become discomforting figures, while others are seen as entitled to protection against discomfort. We might ask: Whose comfort is at stake here? It is never the perpetual, deeply felt and lived, corrosive sense of discomfort experienced by minoritized people within white supremacist, colonial, sexist, ableist, and queerphobic institutions that is at stake in this politics of comfort.

Indeed, merely bringing up the fact of our discomfort is what seems to activate the kinds of white and cishetero fragility that appeals to “comfort” encode. The reality of minoritized people’s discomfort—and what it implies about our collective investments—is apparently too much for the straight, white ego to process. Reckoning with the discomfort of minoritized people would require that whiteness and cisheteronormativity become decentered and parochialized, no longer privileged, naturalized, and unmarked. This activates fear and discomfort in the privileged subject. As Puwar (2004, 49) describes: “The dread of being displaced from an identity that has placed the white subject as being central to the world propels one to be constantly vigilant to the activities of the figures that make it uncomfortable to hold on to this position. The vigilance borders on the paranoiac, an anxiety that unleashes its own so-called ‘protective’ symbolic and physical violence.”

Let us pay close attention, then, to appeals to comfort and the forms of violence that they summon. Appeals to dis/comfort can tell us much about the functioning of power, privilege, difference, and authority. They can illuminate what our institutions seek to maintain and reproduce. Often the politics of comfort points to how the sanctity, the very future, of our institutions is seen to depend on the systematic and structural containment of its “others.” If we are committed to transformative change in our institutions, we might just have to get used to making people uncomfortable—staying with and following discomfort toward other spaces and alternative futures (Eaves et al. 2023, 523).

Scene: Respectfully Perverted

2023. It was another night at the Surly Wench—this time it was industrial music night, populated, as usual, mostly by queer and trans people. I stepped outside to the patio, pulled a barstool against the brick wall and sat facing outward, taking in the scene of the patio while drinking my beer.

My eyes landed on a person at the nearest table. They’d gotten out of their seat and were standing in the middle of the patio moving around in an animated spirit. They wore fishnets and garters, a string of pearls, fuzzy cat ears, and a black t-shirt that read “respectfully perverted.” At first I scoffed at the shirt, as this kind of chaotic irreverence was not exactly my brand, and I wasn’t sure what it accomplished in the current political moment. But after a few moments, the wit of it registered and I grinned to myself.

I thought about work, about the culture there, about what made it so difficult, so taxing to be there, so difficult to really be seen and heard. They want you to be polite, they want you to be “civil,” they want you to be “professional,” I thought, but at the same time, you could only ever be figured as an outsider, a threat, a monster within this institution. These words seemed to be defined at odds with what I was. As far as I could tell, you had to be white (which I am), a touch bourgeois (which I could muster), and straight and cis to be civil and professional, or you at least had to be ready to emulate or defer to all of that. To be civil was to act all of that out, to be polite about it, to go along with it without pointing out what it was: a racialized, gendered, sexualized, classed social hierarchy. The discourse of professionalism, of collegiality, of civility, had the appearance of rational subjects held in a state of equality and mutual recognition, but that wasn’t what it was. It didn’t mean justice, or dialogue, or even rationality; it meant deference to how things were. It meant—above all else—not making people uncomfortable.

How is one to inhabit such spaces when, a scratch under the surface, they are built on their exclusion, submission, and oppression? What could belonging or inclusion possibly mean here? How could one speak, how could one be heard, in an institution wherein their voice is always already perceived as disruptive, defamatory, inflammatory, deceptive, divisive, dangerous?

This antagonism was built into our discipline, into its cultures, but also more fundamentally into its structures of knowledge. Our tradition had produced so many “others,” so many devalued forms of life and meaning. Now those others were in the room, and our place here had become overdetermined by the oppressive knowledge of this tradition. The social relations that took form in this institution—that made this space—were structured by our colonial, racist, sexist knowledge tradition, even if we thought we had disavowed its ugly parts.

How, after all, could we recognize Black colleagues when we, as an intellectual community, have inherited a tradition that positions Black people as “ungeographical” and “philosophically undeveloped” (McKittrick 2006, xiii), that positions Black life as uncivilized, inhuman, sutured to primativity, to devalued spaces, to the “uninhabitable,” to death (McKittrick 2013)? How would we recognize Indigenous colleagues when entire histories of knowledge, power, and violence conspire to portray them as a relic of the past, when authoritative knowledge, the rule of law, and settler common sense assert that Indigenous attachments to space and place are amodern and irrational, that their claims and relations to land simply don’t matter, don’t count (Barnd 2017; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Rifkin 2014)? How would we recognize trans colleagues when we had heard over and over again that they presented a threat to nature, to order, to sense itself? How would we recognize disabled people, their lives and meanings, when our tradition and the everyday workings of our institutions erased them, positioning their lives as less-than, as not worth considering? How would we learn to recognize any minoritized people here when our tradition made it clear, even if implicitly, that their spaces, their meanings, were not worth remarking upon, that they were devoid of any value, that they were not worth knowing, that they meant nothing?

What civility asked of us, as minoritized people in these spaces, was to leave that in the past, to bracket the entanglements of their knowledge and our oppression. That seemed impossible, given the clear connections between these knowledge traditions and this institutional space. As Baldwin (2022, 21) points out, “We have been relegated to the margins of knowledge and have therefore been imagined as outside of the production of this space.”

Under such conditions, “belonging” to this institution, being “included,” didn’t feel good; “inhabiting the transparent space of the university”—a space that disavows hierarchical difference while being built on it and perpetuating it—“often does not feel good” for those of us left out of the Enlightenment knowledge project (Baldwin 2022, 148). It was those very knowledge systems that defined us, to varying extents, as outside of the human, outside of personhood, as incapable of being subjects of knowledge (51), that rendered violence against us as common sense, as an unremarkable background feature of this world.

But for the sake of protecting “the institution,” we would have to bracket all of this. These questions were threats to “the institution,” whatever it was. It caused discomfort to bring these kinds of things up. We all knew what followed on the heels of white and cishetero discomfort: the fragility, the tropes, the name-calling, the silencing, the discipline, the conflict that would always cost you more, the violence, the reenactment of historical and lived traumas. Discomfort was a vehicle for ignorance, for privilege, for power—one that would be wielded against you again and again.

In such conditions, you had one of two choices. You could learn your place, defer, attempt to be “respectfully perverted,” at the very least. Or you could lean in and try to smash the whole system.

Writing Against the Institution

2022. “I am worried that you are writing about the department.” This wasn’t the first time I had heard such concerns. Four years earlier, as I entered the PhD program, my colleague, then in a position of leadership, had asked me, “What can we do to make sure you do not write about the department?” She had read the paper I wrote about the drag debacle in my last department (Kinkaid 2019). I laughed off the question. In the span of a short meeting, she asked it two more times. A bit surprised, I offered, “Do not discipline me for speaking and I will have no need to write about the department.”

But now I was, in fact, writing about the department. Not because I wanted to; this kind of storytelling had already cost me enough. I was doing so as a last resort, after exhausting all formal mechanisms and informal routes for “dialogue” and “conflict resolution” at the university following a series of deeply problematic and transphobic incidents with a faculty member. Despite publicly calling for “respectful dialogue” in the midst of this series of conflicts, in private, she repeatedly refused to participate in any formal processes for conflict resolution at the university. She refused any forum in which we would speak as equals, any forum in which she would be held accountable, any forum in which I would have a voice.

In such conditions, I knew that I had to write, I had to speak, to stay here, to have a future here. I also knew my writing might foreclose that future, that it could very well be “a torpedo that I’m aiming at my own future” (Reyes 2022, vii). Yet I came back to writing as a space to be heard, a space to give an account, an account that—within the institution—was met with a surprising amount of resistance and silencing.

I learned much from talking back in this way, from making “complaints.” (How easily one’s experience of an institution becomes heard as and reduced to a “complaint!”) Complaints, following Ahmed, are not petty grievances but calls to redress racialized and gendered harm in institutions, calls to transform a world. As many of us know, institutional complaints don’t often get anywhere, but they might at least get us closer to a critical knowledge of our institutions, how they work, and for whom. Ahmed (2012, 173–74) reflects: “The very labor of transforming institutions, or at least aiming for transformation, is how we learn about institutions as formations.” Complaint, then, becomes a method and tool of a queer phenomenological praxis.

In making complaints, I learned, like Ahmed’s (2021) “institutional mechanic,” about the architecture of an institution, about the defensive mechanisms used to quash critical conversations and silence dissent, even over minor issues where something like an acknowledgment and apology would have sufficed. In making complaints, I learned that logic or principle is often subordinated to rank, to consensus, to comfort. I learned how words like dialogue can be used to stop dialogue. I learned how far some will go to stop themselves from confronting the violence, the contradictions of the institution, by wielding the violence of the institution to protect themselves, guarding themselves from having to reckon with who they had become here, what they were invested in. I learned how even well-meaning, critically minded people are afraid of hearing a complaint, of getting behind a complaint, even when they support it, because it calls too much into question—it might snap a bond with colleagues, with an institution (Ahmed 2021, 8).

More than anything, I was warned that a complaint might do damage. Complaints threatened the legacy of an institution. My colleague was worried that my writing would ruin the reputation of an institution she deeply cared for. That fear was not enough to address the problematic tendencies of that institution. In such moments, the task becomes managing the perception of an institution as racist, as sexist, as transphobic, rather than addressing what is racist, sexist, and transphobic about it (Ahmed 2012, 184). As it happens, “so often just talking about sexism as well as racism is heard as damaging the institution. If talking about sexism and racism is heard as damaging institutions, we need to damage institutions” (Ahmed 2017, 140).

I did not want to damage the institution. That was not my project per se. I did not want to destroy it, but it needed to be remade, transformed. Some things needed to be dismantled, reworked, reimagined (remember that dismantling is a making of space too). Rather, I wanted for us to collectively dismantle what was unethical about it: the whiteness, the straightness, the hierarchy, the abuse of power, the unaccountability. In writing about the department, I was critically (re)describing it—in hopes of spurring on its transformation.

For some, that meant destroying the institution, taking something away from them, ruining a happy story—in which case we might ask: What is the institution we are seeking to protect? Is it not these very things: the institutionalization of sexism, racism, hierarchy, power, and exclusion? What institution, what myths of this institution (as just, progressive, inclusive), were we defending? What myths of ourselves (as benevolent, as critical, as evolved) were we seeking to protect?

In speaking, in writing this way, had I turned against the institution, had I turned against my colleagues? Is to write against the institution to turn against it? I did not think so. In some sense, I figured this was the only way I could write about the institution: I could only give an account of it from the position of a body turned the “wrong” way, a body out of line. To write against the institution, then, was to approach it, to inhabit it at a slant. A critical phenomenology of institutions is a “slantwise knowing” (Hall 2022, 56). This slant encodes a location, a position, an orientation, a queer subjectivity, a terrain of power. It is a vantage point to access the uneven worlds produced by institutions, those obscured in discourses of sameness and practices of forced consensus and conformity. A misfit epistemology, a queer praxis.

Writing against the institution was my critical phenomenological praxis in service of another institutional world. It was a project of jamming the grammar of straight, white worldmaking at the university (Kauffman 2023, 181), turning it around and against itself. As a philosophical and political project, critical phenomenology engages in critical description, and in critical redescription, to render visible the logics shaping dominant worlds. Such acts of redescription are disruptive, necessarily and purposefully so. These forms of knowing might shift the burden of disorientation off minoritized subjects and back at the institution itself, rendering it strange, bringing its “backgrounds” to the fore, questioning its being.

Praxiological principles aside, calling into question the norms of the institution would inevitably place me outside of, against, the institution—and here against implies an antagonistic opposition, not only a social positionality. Whatever my investments and my aims, this work would always be read by some as being against the institution, as damaging something great, as damaging something we love.

Accordingly, such writing would carry great risk. I was not naive to that risk. It had already insinuated itself deeply into my sense of voice, my sense of self, my sense of possibility here. But I would write, however imperfectly, however dangerously. Things would escalate, things would break. Bonds would snap, doors would close. I would wear out my welcome here. But Ahmed (2023, 238) reminds us, “We may need to snap a bond to institutions to prevent other people from being harmed by them.” We may need to break things to get on with building something else. Dismantling, after all, is also a world-building project.

Scene: A Door Closes

2023. I received the call mid-morning. I had felt it coming. I would no longer be permitted in the geography department. I had graduated but had been granted an ongoing research affiliation and a recently renewed desk assignment in the office. I was told I could go to public events but could not be in the office. I had violated no policies—nor was there any effort to demonstrate that I had. Nor, as far as I could tell, did the majority of my colleagues have any problem with me.

I would not be permitted in the building because I made some faculty “uncomfortable.” Coincidentally, the uncomfortable faculty were ones I had confronted about their unethical behavior. The department leadership—the one who had called me a “poisonous influence”—was apparently so “uncomfortable,” so “threatened,” that he could not even inform me of his unilateral decision but sent it through an intermediary.

There was that word again: comfort. How I wanted to dig into it with them. How I wanted them to have to look at themselves, their investments, what they were protecting. My words, my self, had become a mirror, and they did not want to look at themselves.

But I wouldn’t contest it. I had already been sent a thinly veiled threat to cut off my access to university resources if I did anything to “interfere in the internal affairs of the department.” I was told that I was now a “guest” in the department, and I should behave accordingly. How “you can be put in your place by being reminded of how easily it would be for you to lose your place” (Ahmed 2021, 77). It was his house, after all—father’s house, father’s world. Shortly thereafter, he decided that my very presence was an interruption in the “affairs” of the department. Had I ever been anything but a guest in this institution?

A door had slammed shut. “Perceptions can be doors; you can be stopped because of how you are seen” (Ahmed 2023, 164). Now I was on the outside; the door closed, the house was safe. It was a door that was only ever conditionally open for people like me; with our conditional academic citizenship, they were always ready to show us to the door, to remind us our access to this institution is something we should protect at all costs. I wouldn’t protect it.

Where would that leave me? At the margins of this world. I would gather, with so many others, behind these closed doors, at the boundaries of institutions: “Behind closed doors, that is where complaints are often found, so that is where you will find us, too, those of us for whom the house was not built” (Ahmed 2021, 308). Ahmed reminds us that “to complain is to keep knocking on that door, hoping to create an impression, to cause a disturbance, to disturb someone who is there: the spirits who linger there because of the violence that has not been dealt with” (305). I am still here—with my words, I am knocking.

May the slamming of the door also be a generative failure, a refusal, an exit, a line of flight.